With wind farms being installed in areas of increasingly complex flow, either imparted by the terrain, by the presence of nearby obstacles or by thermodynamic effects inherent to the local climate, the understanding and prediction of these phenomena has gained paramount importance.

As a leading wind energy consultancy firm, MEGAJOULE must therefore be equipped with the correct tools to be able to correctly assess the wind characteristics at these sites, in order to advise the client on how to maximize production and minimize down-times and maintenance costs.

What is WindieTM?

Since its creation, MEGAJOULE Inovação has established strong ties with university institutions to better bolster its R&D projects. From its partnership with ISEP comes the first exciting output: a new CFD solution developed specifically for wind engineering by a team with over 15 years experience in CFD development. The software code WindieTM is owned by the company Windie Lda and an exclusive partnership between Windie Lda and MEGAJOULE allows us the use and joint development of the CFD code.

We believe WindieTM is the most advanced CFD code for wind engineering presently available incorporating a number of distinguishing features:

The site assessment studies performed with this new CFD tool are more valuable than other current approaches, due to the correct prediction of separated flow regions and other hazardous flow features. The effects of turbulence, produced through either mechanical or thermal mechanisms, as well as the impact of wind shear and flow inclination, are accounted for to obtain three-dimensional aspects of the flow and provide insight in the micro-siting of wind farm layouts.

It is a crucial part of our service to interpret these results and extract from them the most relevant data to present to our clients, be it virtual time series at layout positions, or direction-averaged data for a more general picture.

As WindieTM is an in-house code, MEGAJOULE Inovação can offer complete versatility in the type of analyses and outputs that can be performed, to better satisfy the requirements of each project.